The Right Strategy Can Still Be Wrong
THIS WEEK'S READ
It's strategic planning season.
As we head into the final quarter of 2026, organizations everywhere are starting to think about next year. Goals are being set. Budgets are being built. Boards are weighing in. And somewhere along the way, a list of strategic priorities will emerge that everyone agrees are the "right" things to do for the year ahead.
But I hate to break it to you: having the right strategy isn't enough. You also have to execute the right strategy at the right time, in the right order. And this is where strategic plans tend to fall short.
Research has consistently found a significant gap between developing a strategy and actually executing it. One Harvard Business Review analysis found that between 67–75% of large organizations struggle with strategy execution.
More recent research published in Long Range Planning in 2026 found that planning alone does not directly improve organizational performance. The value of planning is realized through implementation.
In other words, deciding what to do is only part of the work.
OUR TAKE
Most strategic plans answer two questions:
Where are we going?
What are we going to do?
But there is another question that doesn't get nearly enough attention:
What should we do FIRST?
Organizations are systems. The decisions we make do not happen independently of one another, and their effects rarely happen immediately.
You increase marketing today, but it may take months before that translates into new customers. You launch a new program, but it may take a year before it becomes profitable. You cut expenses and improve the bottom line immediately, only to discover six months later that you also reduced the organization's capacity to deliver.
In systems dynamics, these are delays. There is often a gap between when a decision is made and when we can actually see its full impact on the system, which makes strategy much harder than picking the right initiatives off a list.
Let's use an example: Let's say a membership organization is experiencing declining membership and revenue. The board identifies several perfectly reasonable strategies: raise dues, invest in member acquisition, grow a certification program, reduce expenses, and improve retention.
Every one of those could be the right decision.
But raise dues before improving member value and you may accelerate membership loss. Spend heavily on acquisition while retention is falling and you're paying to bring people into an organization they don't stay in. Cut staff to improve the bottom line and you may reduce the organization's ability to execute the growth initiatives you just approved.
The decisions can all be right and the strategy can still fail because you did them in the wrong order.
There is another lever organizations routinely underestimate in this process: staff capacity.
Every strategy eventually becomes work for someone. A new program has to be built. A marketing campaign has to be managed. New technology has to be implemented. A new revenue stream has to be supported. Even an initiative designed to eventually make the organization more efficient usually requires additional work before it creates any available capacity.
Yet we routinely build strategic plans as though staff capacity is unlimited.
Sorry, it's not.
An organization can have the money to pursue five priorities and still lack the capacity to execute them. When that happens, we often blame the strategy. The initiative didn't work. The return wasn't there. The team didn't execute. But the strategy itself may have been perfectly sound. The organization simply didn't have the capacity to execute it at that point in time.
This is why sometimes the first strategic move shouldn't be the one most likely to generate revenue or growth.
Sometimes the move with the most leverage is the one that creates enough capacity for the next move to function.
And this is where systems dynamics can be incredibly useful.
Instead of looking at a strategic decision in isolation, we can look at how it interacts with the rest of the system over time. What happens six months from now? A year from now? What happens if we make this decision first and another decision later? What changes if we reverse the order?
Because when you change the sequence, you can change the outcome.
An Example in Action
Rather than just tell you about this, we built a way for you to experience it.
Our Think Like a CEO simulator puts you in charge of the Specialty Retailers Alliance, a fictional association that has been losing members for more than a decade.
The association has tried several reasonable strategies. It has raised dues twice. Both times, revenue improved temporarily before membership fell faster and revenue started sliding again. It has a certification program that could potentially create more engaged members and generate additional revenue, but the organization hasn't had the staff capacity to grow it.
Your job is to figure out what to do next. You can raise dues. Invest in certification. Adjust spending. Increase staff capacity. And decide not only what to do, but when to do it.
All of those decisions can help. All of them can also hurt. And that's the point.
There isn't one lever you can pull that fixes the organization. Every decision changes the conditions for the decisions that come after it. Something that generates revenue today may create a problem later. Something that costs money today may create the capacity for growth later. And something that works in year four may have been a terrible decision in year one.
The challenge isn't simply figuring out the right strategy. It's figuring out the right strategy, at the right time, in the right order.
YOUR NEXT MOVE
As you head into strategic planning season, don't stop once you've identified your priorities. Make sure to put them in order.
For every major initiative, ask: What needs to be true for this to work? What else does this decision affect? How much staff capacity will it consume? How long will it take before we should expect to see a result? And what needs to happen before we get there?
Then ask the question most strategic plans miss:
If these are all the right things to do, what happens if we do them in the wrong order?
This is because strategy isn't just a collection of good ideas, it is a sequence. And sometimes the difference between a strategy that works and one that fails isn't WHAT you decided to do. It's WHEN you decided to do it.
Want to put that idea to the test?
Play our Think Like a CEO simulator and see if you can turn around the Specialty Retailers Alliance over the next five years.
At Well Led, we use systems mapping and modeling (like what you see in the CEO Simulator) to help organizations understand how their strategic decisions interact over time, so they can test assumptions, identify risks, and better understand the potential consequences of a decision before making an expensive commitment in the real world. If you're interested in modeling your own strategic plan, email info@wellledstrategies.com to start the conversation.
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